Email Sender - DNS Settings for Email

Make sure emails from your referral program are delivered successfully

Written by Support Updated over a week ago

Friendbuy sends out a few different emails to your customers on your behalf (ex. Shared Email, Reward Email, etc). By default, we will send emails using our own IP addresses and domain configuration. While this works well, we'd highly recommend sending emails from your own domain. This helps you remain brand consistent and ensures that emails from your referral program are delivered without any issues.

Why it's Important

Let’s stop for a moment and think of email as good old paper messages: suppose Juan would like to pass a note to Lisa. If Juan writes the note and gives it to Lisa himself, then Lisa can be pretty confident that the note actually came from Juan. This is what happens with personal email—people send you a message directly, and you know it’s from them.

Now, suppose Juan can’t pass on the note himself. Instead, he asks Erin to give Lisa the note for him. How can Lisa be certain that the note actually came from Juan? One way to accommodate this is for Juan to tell Lisa beforehand that Erin is indeed a reliable intermediary. Once that has been done, Juan can send notes to Lisa through Erin without any issues.

This is what email sender configuration is all about: you, the merchant/retailer are in the role of Juan, Lisa represents your customers, and Erin represents Friendbuy (and its email partner, SendGrid). When you sign up with Friendbuy, your customers will be receiving assorted email from you, but delivered on your behalf by Friendbuy. In order for your customers to have greater confidence that these emails are legitimately from you, you need to assure them—via your domain name provider—that Friendbuy/SendGrid can send email to your customers for you. This is similar to having Juan tell Lisa in advance that he will sometimes send notes to her through Erin.

How to Configure

Once you've completed the form with your business information, you'll be given a set of records that need to be added to your domain host (ex. GoDaddy, Namecheap, etc). There are two TXT records that will need to be added - each with a hostname and value provided on the Email Sender page.

SPF Record

The first record is an "SPF" record whose value should start with "v=spf1". You may already have an SPF record configured in your domain host. If you already have one, you'll need to modify the value of the existing one to include:

include:sendgrid.net ~all

As an example, if the value of your existing record looks like this:

v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com ~all

It will need to be changed to:

v=spf1 a mx include:_spf.google.com include:sendgrid.net ~all

If you do not already have an SPF record, you can add a new TXT record with the hostname listed in your account and the following value:

v=spf1 include:sendgrid.net ~all

⚠️️ In either scenario, the value of the SPF record must end with either '~all' or '-all'.

DKIM Record

The second record is a "DKIM" record whose exact hostname and value will be displayed in your Friendbuy account. You can simply add a new TXT record to your domain host with these values.

The process for adding the SPF and DKIM records to your domain host will vary depending on what provider you've purchased your domain from. You can find instructions for adding these records to common domain hosts here: